► This dissertation examines the cultural accomplishments of Mexican American women in 20th century Texas, looking at how women in the arts paved the way for…
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▼ This dissertation examines the cultural accomplishments of Mexican American women in 20th century Texas, looking at how women in the arts paved the way for a new Mexican American hybrid identity. I examine how Mexican American women in the borderlands, as Gloria Anzald?a so aptly put it, ?became the crossroads? in their bodies, minds and spirits. By examining the lives and work of the four women, Jovita Gonz?lez, Rosita Fern?ndez, Alicia Dickerson Montemayor, and Consuelo ?Chelo? Gonz?lez Amezcua, I have demonstrated that Mexican American women broke boundaries of their own culture and of Anglo Texas culture in order to create their art. In the process of becoming American, they flouted the conventional gender roles and paved the way for a generation of Chicana artists, musicians, and authors. My research was conducted in archives throughout Texas, by examining and analyzing letters, manuscripts, newspapers, recordings, films, TV and video clips, magazines, and art work.
As artists of the borderlands, the women I researched participated in laying the groundwork for a hybrid Mexican American identity, developing Mexican American art that paved the way for the development of a distinctive Mexican American culture by the hybridization and use of common Mexican forms and references in their art, through which they reinforced and redefined Mexican American culture while telling stories that had not been told before.
Advisors/Committee Members: Blackwelder, Julia K. (advisor), Blanton, Carlos K. (committee member), Schmidt, Henry (committee member), Green, Thomas (committee member).

This qualitative study uses multiple autobiographical narratives of racialized transgender men to examine the intersecting axes of oppression at work in the borderlands of identity.…
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This qualitative study uses multiple autobiographical narratives of racialized transgender men to examine the intersecting axes of oppression at work in the borderlands of identity. The research contributes more complex understandings of transgender lives by raising questions about how gender, race, class, and sexuality intersect in the lives of racialized transgender men, and how such identities negotiate their place in the various communities constituted by those particular social locations. In particular I look at the ways that solidarity works in the borderlands, the liminal space composed of intersecting subject positions. I ask what constitutes solidarity, and I discover the contingencies operating in the borderlands that facilitate or pose barriers to full participation and solidarity of racialized transgender men. Findings reveal the complex negotiations racialized transgender men must engage in, both within and outside of queer and feminist communities, and challenge us to think through the meanings of solidarity.

► Following the U.S. annexation of a vast swath of northern Mexico in 1848, a range of English- and Spanish-language authors who lived in the region…
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▼ Following the U.S. annexation of a vast swath of northern Mexico in 1848, a range of English- and Spanish-language authors who lived in the region composed fictions narrating the transformations of government and sovereignty unfolding around them. Contributors to this body of writing include both long-canonized and recently recovered authors from the U.S. and Mexico: John Rollin Ridge, Mark Twain, María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Frank Norris, Heriberto Frías, Lauro Aguirre, Teresa Urrea, and others. “The Borderlands Aesthetic” reconstructs this transnational literary history in order to create a revised account of the aesthetics and politics of realist narrative. The realism of these novels and narratives lies in their presentation of changing social and political landscapes in the nineteenth-century borderlands: less concerned with individual psychology than with social relations and institutions, the works I study construct verisimilar and historically specific milieus in which characters experience the incorporation of border regions into the U.S. and Mexican nation-states. My chapters show how these novelistic worlds archive fugitive histories of competing sovereignty claims, porous borders, non-state polities, and bureaucratized dispossessions. My research thus presents a more extended literary history of novelistic narrative in the borderlands than is commonly recognized: while the borderlands novel is often treated as a form of twentieth-century fiction concerned especially with cultural hybridity, I locate the genre’s emergence a century earlier in writing more concerned with institutions than identities.
Early borderlands narratives construct the institutional milieus of annexation and its aftermath using discontinuous and interruptive formal structures: jumps between first- and third-person narration, plots that wander away from conclusions, juxtapositions of discrepant temporalities, and shifting levels of fictionality. These persistent aesthetic breaks can seem at odds with conventional realist aesthetics. By the second half of the nineteenth century, proponents of realism like William Dean Howells valued the mode not only for its provision of verisimilar details but also for how it embedded characters in organic and cohesive social wholes via continuously thick description and interconnected plots. Yet I argue that it is the turn away from such narrative techniques that serves as an engine of realism in the borderlands: with their aesthetic breaks and interruptions, these works construct a fabric of social and political relations that is not a single totality but a multi-layered and division-marked assemblage. I contend that the interruptive structures of borderlands narratives are not manifestations of an alternate formation of realism but distillations of an underappreciated tendency within the mode more generally to dramatize social division via formal discontinuity. That tendency is especially apparent in the works I study because the massive social upheaval following the political reorganization…

► This analysis focuses on the literary works of the Mexican writer Luis Humberto Crosthwaite. The principal objective of this study is to show how Crosthwaite’s…
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▼ This analysis focuses on the literary works of the Mexican writer Luis Humberto Crosthwaite. The principal objective of this study is to show how Crosthwaite’s works are innovative forms of borderlands literature. Although some literary scholars have criticized Crosthwaite as monothematic and boring, through the succinct analysis of his creative writing and the use of different literary concepts such as rhizome, chronotope, liminality, and third space, this dissertation demonstrates that his works encompass not only themes from Mexico-United States border culture and language, but they also expand beyond border topics. Consequently, Crosthwaite creates a form of literature that is diverse and heterotopic.
Advisors/Committee Members: Wray, Grady (advisor), Cantu, Norman (committee member), Boggs, Bruce (committee member), Cortest, Luis (committee member), Evans, Sterling (committee member).

► In my thesis, I will focus on roles in Angela Carter's The Magic Toyshop that are forced upon women in order to transform them into…
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▼ In my thesis, I will focus on roles in Angela Carter's The Magic Toyshop that are forced upon women in order to transform them into passive, powerless figures who adjust to feminine roles and not yearn for activities and qualities that are attributed to men.
However, by the end of the novel it becomes obvious that women characters disobey Philip and his patriarchy several times and they step across the border of femininity. It reveals that the border between femininity and masculinity that is set up by patriarchal system can be crossed.
Advisors/Committee Members: Szabó, Orsolya Zsuzsanna (advisor).

► Making Nations: The Northeastern Borderlands in an Age of Revolution, 1760-1820 examines migration within northeastern North America, and the gradual formation of a meaningful border…
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▼ Making Nations: The Northeastern Borderlands in an Age
of Revolution, 1760-1820 examines migration within northeastern
North America, and the gradual formation of a meaningful border
between the District of Maine and the Province of New Brunswick.
The American Revolution, though it divided the northeast between
New England and British North America, did not fundamentally change
attitudes toward the borderland. For decades, the region had been a
special sort of frontier – a more connected frontier, offering
migrants from southern New England better access to Atlantic trade.
The post-revolutionary era rapidly reverted to pre-war patterns, as
settlers crossed a largely meaningless border looking for fertile
land and economic connectivity. These settlers, I argue, were not
late loyalists, choosing British territory, or early republicans,
choosing the U.S. This was one migration, to the borderland and the
similar opportunities on both sides. So how did migration within a
shared borderland become immigration across a meaningful border?
Post-revolution, both Congregationalists and Catholics began to
build networks in Maine that stopped at the border. A
Congregational missionary society, the Society for Propagating the
Gospel Among the Indians and Others in North America, realized it
could secure state funding from Massachusetts by advertising itself
as a tool for managing the growing settlements in Maine. State
money helped the society grow rapidly, and as similar groups formed
they chose to join the pioneer society as partners rather than
compete with it. Meanwhile, Congregational women created
institutions called “ladies cent societies,” which provided a
massive infusion of funding into the system. The resulting
Congregational network grew to encompass almost the entire American
half of the borderland. At the same time, a Catholic network also
grew in Maine, connecting the Catholic Passamaquoddy and Penobscot
people to Boston, as well as to Irish Catholics along Maine’s
coast. As these networks grew they changed eastern Maine from a
place that was attractive because of its connections with British
North America, to a place that was attractive because of its
connections with New England. These networks made the border
meaningful – and immovable. Though politicians on both sides
persisted for years in believing they could still adjust the
border, they were wrong. It had already taken root.
Advisors/Committee Members: Owen Stanwood (Thesis advisor).

Morton JD. Making Nations: The Northeastern Borderlands in an Age of
Revolution, 1760-1820. [Doctoral Dissertation]. Boston College; 2019. Available from: http://dlib.bc.edu/islandora/object/bc-ir:108579

Columbia University

7.
Luna Lucero, Brian.
Invention And Contention: Identity, Place, And Memory Of The Spanish Past In The American Southwest, 1848-1940.

► As the twentieth century unfolded, American writers, critics, and boosters presented a narrative of the arid Southwest as an exotic place blessed with a romantic…
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▼ As the twentieth century unfolded, American writers, critics, and boosters presented a narrative of the arid Southwest as an exotic place blessed with a romantic history that could inspire, captivate and renew the many new white citizens flocking to rapidly growing cities. The history of Spanish colonialism in the area became a precious and exclusive cultural and economic resource. This dissertation tells the story of the commemoration of the Spanish past from 1848 to 1940 in three Spanish towns that grew into prominent American cities: Tucson, Arizona; Albuquerque, New Mexico; and San Antonio, Texas. In chapters centered on space, historic preservation, Mexican folk ritual, and pageants, this work examines the stories told about the Spanish past in these cities and reveals how people of differing classes and ethnicities gave meaning to the places they lived and to the process of American annexation of the region. That meaning shaped individual and social identities as well as the flow of power between them.

► "Between Empire and Nation" provides a spatial history of Egypt's western borderland in order to illuminate the Egyptian nation-state as a work-in-progress in the decades…
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▼ "Between Empire and Nation" provides a spatial history of Egypt's western borderland in order to illuminate the Egyptian nation-state as a work-in-progress in the decades prior to World War I. It argues that state and nation did not come fully formed to Egypt's western domains, but rather emerged only gradually as the result of a complex and ongoing process of contestation and negotiation between an array of state and non-state actors along the borderland, each harnessing their own distinct sovereign capabilities. This interpretation challenges long-standing historiographical and nationalist assumptions about Egypt's geographical stability and legibility, which have served to conceal the set of remarkably fraught, fluid and tentative processes through which Egypt was constituted as a modern territorial nation-state.
To illustrate these themes, this dissertation highlights several overlapping layers of interactivity – between different states engaged in the region, as well as between state and society – that coalesced to transform Egypt's western domains into a contested borderland. In the first two chapters, it demonstrates the role that key local actors – most notably the Sanusiyya Brotherhood – played in mediating various centralizing projects undertaken by the Egyptian state in the region. The third chapter focuses on the activities of the Khedive Abbas Hilmi II in Siwa as a means to explore the complex interplay between various competing marks of sovereignty in the borderland. The final two chapters chart the emergence of a clearer sense of "borderedness" between two distinct political spheres in the region, even despite the sustained lack of any clear territorial definition. This transformation was, again, animated by processes of negotiation and contestation – between the Ottomans, Egyptians, and Italians, and between these state actors and the various Bedouin tribes who inhabited the borderland.
Drawing on a range of archival materials from the state archives in Istanbul, Cairo, Rome, and London – as well as the underutilized private papers of Abbas Hilmi II – this dissertation examines the case of Egypt's western borderland as a means to address broader historical debates about the nature of nation-state space, borderland society, and overlapping scales of sovereignty and political authority.
Advisors/Committee Members: Greene, Molly (advisor).

▼ By developing the concept of "global borderlands"-semi-autonomous, foreign-controlled geographic locations geared toward international exchange-this dissertation shifts the focus of globalization literature from elite global cities and cities on national borders to within-country sites owned and/or operated by foreigners and defined by significant social, cultural, and economic exchange. I first define global borderlands and describe their shared features. Next, I situate global borderlands with the literatures on global cities, which are economic command and control centers, and traditional borderlands that highlight micro interactions across two national boundaries, and note that global borderlands represent nationally bounded, foreign-controlled centers for cultural and social interactions that also have important economic influence for their host nations. In this way, they are localized command and control centers of varied forms of foreign exchange. Then, I detail my case study, methodologies, and data. Next, I examine their creation, and show how these sites are purposefully constructed, the result of political and economic bargaining, and situated in particular historical circumstances. Following this, I analyze the three-shared features of these sites: semi-autonomy, symbolic and geographic boundaries, and unequal relations. to show (1) how the semi-autonomy of global borderlands produces different regulations depending on nationality, (2) how its geographic and symbolic borders differentiate this space from the surrounding community, and (3) how the semi-autonomy of these locations and their geographic and symbolic borders reproduce unequal relations. As home of the former U.S. Subic Bay Naval Base and current site of a Freeport Zone, the SBFZ serves as a particularly strategic research location to examine the different forms of interactions that occur between groups within spaces of unequal power. This multi-method analyses reveal how the analytic concept of global borderlands can help us better understand the interactions that occur in the contemporary era of globalization across people of different nationalities, classes, and races/ethnicities as well as the complex dynamics that occur within foreign-controlled spaces.
Advisors/Committee Members: Centeno, Miguel A (advisor).

► This dissertation is about knowledge, power, and identities in North America. It practices and develops borderlands history of science as a method for exploring the…
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▼ This dissertation is about knowledge, power, and identities in North America. It practices and develops borderlands history of science as a method for exploring the interplay between these factors during the earliest period of the United States' territorial expansion, the 1780s to the early 1840s. Approaching science in the early United States from a borderlands perspective and decentering the thirteen original states on the nation's eastern periphery reveals a new picture of the knowledge, practices, individuals, and networks that comprised American culture on the whole during its formative years. Multinational individuals within borderland regions, entanglements with neighboring empires, and the imperial dimensions of the early republic were all constitutive of national science and culture. The southeast borderlands—the Gulf South territories that would become the states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida—is an ideal region for decentering the history of the United States: it was as much a part of the Caribbean, Spanish, and French worlds as it was of Anglo-North America and it was central to the worlds of Creeks, Seminoles, Choctaws, and other Native groups. Scientific practitioners, ideas, and techniques in the southeast borderlands were integral to the development of both national identity and imperialism in the early United States. U.S. officials and men of science did not simply create the scientific perspectives and practices used to dominate the former Spanish, French, and British colonies of the Gulf South. Instead, they incorporated the region's multinational scientific experts, drew on the examples of other empires, and used the Gulf South as an experimental space in which they could perfect more advanced methods of exploiting the land and its peoples. Science and culture in the United States were multinational, multiethnic, and inextricable from the imperial context in which they developed.
Advisors/Committee Members: Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge (advisor), Sidbury, James (advisor), Hunt, Bruce (committee member), Olwell, Robert (committee member), Morris, Christopher (committee member).

Borderland communities unequally and disproportionately suffer at the altar of geopolitics. Rather than the periphery, borderlands are the epicenter of territorial conflict and contests over…
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Borderland communities unequally and disproportionately suffer at the altar of geopolitics. Rather than the periphery, borderlands are the epicenter of territorial conflict and contests over sovereignty. This is evident in the Republic of Georgia after the 2008 Russo-Georgian war, where the Federal Security Service (FSB) of the Russian Federation began incrementally and unilaterally demarcating sections of the boundary line to the disputed and unrecognized territory of South Ossetia. This dissertation uses a feminist geopolitics approach to critically examine the violent geography of this borderization process. In addition to performing de facto sovereignty, borderization is theorized as a biopolitical tool of leverage. Qualitative mixed methods and multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in a series of “conflict-affected villages” adjacent to the South Ossetian Administrative Boundary Line reveal how the uncertainties of the elastic border impacts the in/security of rural populations, whose pasturelands, homes, and social worlds are now bifurcated by the hardening of this dividing line. Two in-depth empirical chapters illustrate the embodied and emotional experiences of border violence. The first chapter shows how borderization transforms borderland villages into a "neitherland," which is a type of zone of abandonment. Through an emphasis on gendered mobilities, the second chapter demonstrates how ambiguously demarcated sections of the boundary imperil men vis-à-vis women, putting them at risk of arbitrary detention by the Russian-backed security regime. Attention to the issue of restricted freedom of movement and how men confront the border regime exposes an emerging form of traumatic masculinity, reinforcing an understanding of border violence as a gendered phenomenon.

► My dissertation explores a multilayered landscape of contestation at the Aymara borderlands of Guallatire. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with guallatire単os in this Andean locality, I…
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▼ My dissertation explores a multilayered landscape of contestation at the Aymara borderlands of Guallatire. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with guallatire単os in this Andean locality, I focus on how both the history of border institutionalization and the creation of the Lauca Biosphere Reserve impacted ethnicity processes and indigenous ownership in the highlands. I examine the politics of indigeneity as a mobile social formation and transnational field of governance, subjectivities and knowledges, along with notions of heritage shaped by the materiality of property. While struggling for cultural recognition and economic redistribution, guallatire単os have been confronted with a neoliberal state apparatus and violent mechanisms of government, including contradictory legislation which consequently has fragmented traditional native territories and communities, privatized land and water rights, and ultimately invisibilized Indigenous Peoples. However, the free market model has also shaped contested terrains between public and private sectors in the Lauca, paradoxically weakening the role of the state and causing friction among the various stakeholders involved in the Biosphere Reserve. By studying a series of state-driven `participatory meetings' for indigenous and touristic development, I conclude that participatory governance in the Lauca territory has challenged democratic practices and created spaces for indigenous recognition and political representation. Different strategies of resistance are continually performed by the Aymara to negotiate their ethnic identities and cultural boundaries in Northern Chile.
Advisors/Committee Members: Valentina, Napolitano, Anthropology.

► The Chicano movements of the 1960s transformed protest and unrest into significant gains in the status of young Mexican Americans. Deriving strength from the political…
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▼ The Chicano movements of the 1960s transformed protest and unrest into significant gains in the status of young Mexican Americans. Deriving strength from the political climate of their times, the movements were driven largely by youth organized around the common identity paradigm of Chicanismo and agitating for fundamental change in socio-political discourses and hierarchies within the United States. Since the 1960s, however, collective youth action has rarely been evident in the historical record of Chicanismo, and globalization and transnationalism have influenced the terms of Mexican American experience, identification, and social action themselves. Tucson, Arizona, somewhat in the periphery of the original Chicano movements, finds itself at the epicenter of today's ideological and practical contests over the legacies of the movimiento. This city, located just sixty miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border, until 2012 hosted one of the country's only public school departments of Mexican American Studies, which itself was home to one of the country's first formalized social-justice education curricula. In the first decade of the 21st century, precipitous increases in the number of graduates of these curricula converged with the collapse of world financial markets and resulting local crises in socio-political economy, which had intersecting, rippled effects on both side of the U.S.-Mexico border. In the ensuing climate of financial constriction and ideological transformation, subterranean questions about national belonging and legitimacy surfaced in local and national political challenges to Mexican immigration and "appropriate" schooling curriculum. Local Chicana/o youth responded to these local and larger contestations to their legitimacy as citizens and students by mobilizing some of the most significant public actions since the 1960s.This dissertation investigates the awakening into critical consciousness and pursuant social action of Mexican American high school students, youth "activists" and "organizers" in Tucson, Arizona. Building from ethnography conducted across nine years within youth actors' sites of activism and social justice engagement, this research reveals new complexities in our understanding of "activist" identity and enactments, and contends that understandings of both "activism" and "Chicanismo" must be revisited in the scholarship of youth movements, generally, and Chicana/o social action, specifically.
Advisors/Committee Members: Cammarota, Julio (advisor), Woodson, Drexel (advisor), Baro, Mamadou (committeemember), Cammarota, Julio (committeemember), Woodson, Drexel (committeemember).

Stauber, L. S. (2012). Chicanismo in the New Generation: "Youth, Identity, Power" in the 21st Century Borderlands
. (Doctoral Dissertation). University of Arizona. Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/10150/223346

Chicago Manual of Style (16th Edition):

Stauber, Leah S. “Chicanismo in the New Generation: "Youth, Identity, Power" in the 21st Century Borderlands
.” 2012. Doctoral Dissertation, University of Arizona. Accessed June 07, 2020.
http://hdl.handle.net/10150/223346.

Stauber LS. Chicanismo in the New Generation: "Youth, Identity, Power" in the 21st Century Borderlands
. [Internet] [Doctoral dissertation]. University of Arizona; 2012. [cited 2020 Jun 07].
Available from: http://hdl.handle.net/10150/223346.

Council of Science Editors:

Stauber LS. Chicanismo in the New Generation: "Youth, Identity, Power" in the 21st Century Borderlands
. [Doctoral Dissertation]. University of Arizona; 2012. Available from: http://hdl.handle.net/10150/223346

Rice University

14.
Valentin, Edward.
Black Enlisted Men in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands: Race, Citizenship, and Military Occupation, 1866-1930.

▼ This dissertation relies on underused sources—including court martial records and black veterans’ pension files—to examine the experiences of black soldiers in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands during the post-Civil War era. It focuses on soldiers’ cross-cultural encounters with the racially and ethnically diverse communities that surrounded the posts they garrisoned, revealing how black enlisted men viewed and attempted to define their positions within the complex and fluid social order of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. An analysis of black soldiers’ experiences enriches our understandings of race, ethnicity, gender, and settler colonialism by illuminating how these men both supported and undermined U.S. imperial projects. As agents of U.S. expansion, black troops actively transformed the West and secured the region for white settlements, but simultaneously undermined U.S. expansion by challenging the military justice system and building relationships that transcended the very boundaries they were charged with policing. This project thus not only sheds light on the experiences of black soldiers in the American West, but also enriches our understandings of the complicated processes associated with settler colonialism and claims to rights and citizenship in the post-Civil War era.
Advisors/Committee Members: McDaniel, William C. (advisor).

Duan, Z. (2015). At the Edge of Mandalas The Transformation of the China's
Yunnan Borderlands in the 19th and 20th Century. (Doctoral Dissertation). Arizona State University. Retrieved from http://repository.asu.edu/items/38774

Chicago Manual of Style (16th Edition):

Duan, Zhidan. “At the Edge of Mandalas The Transformation of the China's
Yunnan Borderlands in the 19th and 20th Century.” 2015. Doctoral Dissertation, Arizona State University. Accessed June 07, 2020.
http://repository.asu.edu/items/38774.

MLA Handbook (7th Edition):

Duan, Zhidan. “At the Edge of Mandalas The Transformation of the China's
Yunnan Borderlands in the 19th and 20th Century.” 2015. Web. 07 Jun 2020.

Vancouver:

Duan Z. At the Edge of Mandalas The Transformation of the China's
Yunnan Borderlands in the 19th and 20th Century. [Internet] [Doctoral dissertation]. Arizona State University; 2015. [cited 2020 Jun 07].
Available from: http://repository.asu.edu/items/38774.

Council of Science Editors:

Duan Z. At the Edge of Mandalas The Transformation of the China's
Yunnan Borderlands in the 19th and 20th Century. [Doctoral Dissertation]. Arizona State University; 2015. Available from: http://repository.asu.edu/items/38774

The movement of people and their social organisation across nation-state and cultural borders is a primary research focus of contemporary anthropology. My thesis which centres on this general concern focuses on how state control over territory and people is exercised in local settlement areas wherein specific ethnic groups are moving across real or imagined borders, and on how local and state relations are articulated and negotiated. With particular focus on the Kachin at the Thai-Burma border, the thesis entails an ethnography of mobility and settlement analysing cross-border movement from specific points of rupture. It aims to challenge the preconceived image of fixed landscapes of independent nations and autonomous local or peripheral cultures and settlements. This thesis offers a critical analysis of questions surrounding the production and reproduction of “sovereignty”, “exceptionalism” and “belonging”.

This thesis shifts focus from a study of the effects of state policy on marginal people, which is basically a view from the state centre, to an ethnography concentrating on people at the margins, or periphery. The purpose of the thesis is to highlight and explore such ambiguity in the context of the historical movement and settlement of Kachin in northern Thailand. This thesis focusses on the certain aspects and process of the lives of individuals and regulatory institutions that constitute and refashion, so to speak, instances of exceptionalism.

Border politics are thus the primary focus of my research that investigates institutions and practices defining and controlling social space, sovereignty and the historical trajectories of negotiation across different power regimes. In effect, the thesis explores the degree to which the sum of the above is crystallised in the history of – and everyday life within – the Kachin village of Jinghpaw Kahtawng at the Thai-Burma border. What this shows us is the complexity and ambiguities of belonging and non-belonging for cross-border populations as they attempt to integrate into larger state institutions as well as simultaneously reproduce a connection to a perceived homeland.

► This report explores how residents of the Louisiana-Texas borderland defined and maintained the northeastern frontier of New Spain in the long eighteenth century. Utilizing colonial…
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▼ This report explores how residents of the Louisiana-Texas borderland defined and maintained the northeastern frontier of New Spain in the long eighteenth century. Utilizing colonial correspondence, royal decrees, and petitions, this study considers how subaltern historical actors – runaways, deserters, and foreigners – affected the geographic reality of Spanish sovereignty in the American Gulf Coast. Their movements across imperial borders illuminate the elusiveness of those borderlines and suggest alternate boundaries separating Spain's American territory from that of her rivals. In their responses to royal questionnaires, soldiers garrisoned at the easternmost presidios of Los Adaes and Nacogdoches based their perceptions of New Spain's geopolitical limits on the actions of border crossers. The actions of religious and political leaders, as well as the official protocol regarding runaway slaves and deserting soldiers, served as the evidence frontiersmen used to identify the location of the northern borderland. The tenuous status of the periphery led to flexibility in imperial control. Rather than enforce Spanish laws from the top-down, Texas officials relied on the knowledge and understanding of local dwellers to protect an ill-defined boundary in ways that both challenged royal law while maintaining distinct elements of colonial border control.
Advisors/Committee Members: Twinam, Ann, 1946- (advisor), Deans-Smith, Sussan (committee member).

Villarreal CM. Colonial border control : reconsidering migrants and the making of New Spain's northern borderlands, 1714-1820. [Masters Thesis]. University of Texas – Austin; 2015. Available from: http://hdl.handle.net/2152/32363

Portland State University

18.
Cochrane, Brandy Marie.
Drowning In It: State Crime and Refugee Deaths in the Borderlands.

► This paper examines the current state of border hardening against refugees in the European Union and Australia through the lens of state crime. Border…
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▼ This paper examines the current state of border hardening against refugees in the European Union and Australia through the lens of state crime. Border hardening strategies are described for both of these areas and a theoretical basis of state crime victimology is used to examine the refugees who encounter this border hardening. The present study analyzes two data sets on border deaths, one for the European Union and one for Australia, to examine the demographics of the refugees who perish while attempting to transgress the border. Results indicated that there remains a significant amount of missing data, suggesting that official methods of record-keeping are necessary to determine the most basic demographics, such as gender and age, so analyses can be run to determine significance in this area. One clear finding was that migrants most frequently die from drowning (EU: 83.6%; AU: 93%) compared to any other cause. Also, there is indication that those from disadvantaged areas of origin (such as the Middle East and Africa) are more likely to die in the borderlands than others in the dataset. Practical implications of the findings are discussed along with suggestions for future research.
Advisors/Committee Members: Emily Salisbury.

► This dissertation examines the role of slaving during the encounter between indigenous societies and Euro-American empires in the Texas borderlands from 1700 to 1840. Historians…
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▼ This dissertation examines the role of slaving during the encounter between indigenous societies and Euro-American empires in the Texas borderlands from 1700 to 1840. Historians have generally overlooked the structures that bound continental and Atlantic slave systems together. In this multipolar borderland pastoral and plantation modes of production conflicted and comingled, drawing all participants into a “cruel embrace” rife with possibilities for exploitation, destruction, and reinvention. Indigenous war leaders, Euro-American traders, and captives of all nations made their own histories of enslavement and abolition. The dissertation charts the formation of French and Spanish colonies in Louisiana and Texas during the eighteenth century, where forced, long-distance transfers placed indigenous and African populations into plantation and mission regimes. Slaving figured prominently in the confrontation of these band societies and European empires, and captives themselves assumed significant roles during a period of protracted inter-cultural warfare. Following Mexican independence in 1821, the arrival of Native American and Anglo-American colonists introduced new contenders for control of land and labour in this fractious borderland. During the ensuing conflicts of the 1830s and 1840s, new multi-ethnic cohorts emerged to contest the expansion of plantation slavery.

▼ AbstractViolent Inscriptions:Border Crossings in Early Nineteenth-Century American Literary HistoryLisa SchilzMy dissertation, Violent Inscriptions: Trauma, Translation, and Trans-nation in the Borderlands, stages convergences among a multilingual, multicultural web of texts and textual traces—Comanche, Ojibwe, Mexican, U.S., German—that thematize and register violence in the early national period. While 1848 has rightly been proclaimed as a (or even the) significant periodizing marker for American Studies, I return to the seminal complicated prior history of relations in the borderland spaces, a time when U.S. and Anglophone hegemony was not yet assured. The multimodal texts and cultural productions I recover (poetry, written and oral stories, government records) remain underexamined in U.S. literary studies and historiography, as they do not lend themselves easily to dominant grids of intelligibility, such as the nation-state, traditional periodizations, or monocultural and monolingual traditions. My comparative work retains field-specific research methods (such as from Indigenous and Latin American Studies) and brings them together in order to question the dominant lingering grids that do not capture the potential of these texts to envision alternative possibilities. The convergence of these materials troubles dominant Anglo-American definitions of land and property, temporality, and belonging as well as reframes the spatial and temporal markers of the borderlands. I extend the reach of the Latino-American borderlands model to feature Native American intellectual traditions more prominently. My project calls attention to the long-standing and diverse tribal sovereignties, pre-existing and surpassing what are now the boundaries of the U.S. nation state. It also unearths an unexpected connection to German immigrants, who abounded in and wrote prolifically about borderland spaces. Considering German immigrants allows for negotiations of racial boundaries within whiteness itself. In its four chapters, my dissertation focuses on archival and oral sources regarding both the southern and northern borderlands as well as texts written by Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, Charles Sealsfield, and Lorenzo de Zavala.

► This interdisciplinary study on the century-long Chamizal land dispute, caused by the meanderings of the Río Grande, examines the diasporic consequences of the Chamizal Relocation…
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▼ This interdisciplinary study on the century-long Chamizal land dispute, caused by the meanderings of the Río Grande, examines the diasporic consequences of the Chamizal Relocation Project. Settled in 1964, the Chamizal National Memorial in El Paso, Texas represents the only territory of the former Mexican north, lost to the U.S. in 1848, returned to México. Scholarship typically represents this treaty as an example of friendship between the two nations, and therefore overlooks both the treaty’s consequences on the 5,500 Mexicans-Americans who lived on this contested land and what this dispute illuminates about the fluidity of geopolitical borders. The Chamizal dispute, then, illustrates not only that (geo)political borders are a colonial construct that separates the empowered from the disempowered, but also how these power relations reshape the lives and world(view)s of those caught in the middle.The whole point of setting the border between México and the U.S. in 1848 was that the river was not supposed to move; in fact, a moving border was not supposed to be possible. The diligent erasure of this dispute from both dominant U.S. history and counterhegemonic accounts signals this history’s constructed unknowability. As a story that entails alternative positionalities, struggles, and interpretations over the meaning of place and borders, I argue this “unknowability” is not only willed, but underwritten by transformative forms of knowledge. Indeed, it is a story that reminds us that “there already exists a terrain through which different stories and geographic knowledges can be and are told.”

Between 1845 and 1848, the United States doubled the size of its land holdings in North America, as Texas, Oregon, California, New Mexico, and…
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History

Between 1845 and 1848, the United States doubled the size of its land holdings in North America, as Texas, Oregon, California, New Mexico, and other western regions were placed under the umbrella of U.S. sovereignty. Echoing John L. O’Sullivan’s famous phrase, historians have deemed these acquisitions “Manifest Destiny,” and have assumed that U.S. expansion – whether for good or ill – was foreordained. Yet this understanding fundamentally fails to take into account the history of the decade prior to 1846, when Americans throughout the continent believed that it was more likely that the United States would not expand beyond its borders. Examining five groups of Americans operating at the nations geographic and/or social margins, this dissertation argues that these groups hoped to achieve sovereignty outside of the United States. Nurtured by Jacksonian rhetoric that celebrated local government and personal ambition, and wary of – and at times running from – a United States mired in depression and uncertainty, these Americans were, in effect, forming their own “breakaway republics.” To validate their goal of self-sovereignty, breakaway republicans looked to the independent Republic of Texas, often referring to Texas to explain their objectives, or looking to Texas as an ally in achieving them. Between 1836 and 1845 – what this dissertation defines as “the Texas Moment” – Texas’ independent existence presupposed a different map of North America, where peoples of the northern, southern, and western borderlands carved out polities for themselves. With Texas in mind, even Americans who did not share the goals of breakaway republicans believed that independent American-led polities on the continent were likely, acceptable, and perhaps even desired. However, to a cabal of Democratic expansionists and James K. Polk in particular, this future was unacceptable. After winning the presidency after an unlikely series of contingencies in 1844, Polk and his allies laid the groundwork for a dramatic expansion of the U.S. state – and thereby a dramatic expansion of U.S. territory. Their actions ended the Texas Moment, thereby subsuming the actions of breakaway republicans and hiding their collective existence from later historians. Ultimately, the events of the mid-1840s were hardly the logical culmination of America’s expansionist destiny, but a profound rupture of the status quo.

► Texas participated in the bracero program until 1943, when the Mexican government instituted a labor embargo against the state because of numerous reports of racial…
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▼ Texas participated in the bracero program until 1943,
when the Mexican government instituted a labor embargo against the
state because of numerous reports of racial discrimination there.
For the next several years, Texas officials worked to convince
Mexican leaders to rescind the embargo through a wide variety of
policies including investigating cases of discrimination, reforming
aspects of the state education system, negotiating directly with
Mexican officials, enlisting the cooperation of the U.S. federal
government, and working to improve the image of Texas among the
Mexican public. Texas created new government bureaucracies to
coordinate these efforts, including the Inter-Agency Committee, the
Council on Human Relations, and most importantly, the Good Neighbor
Commission. Collectively, these efforts represent a striking effort
by Texas leaders and private citizens to influence the foreign
policy between their state, and sometimes their individual
community, and the Mexican government. Despite these efforts, the
embargo dragged on for years. This dissertation argues that the
slow resolution of the labor embargo was due less to the
intransigence of the Mexican government than to the inability of
Texas leaders to effect the kinds of changes within Texas society,
such as passing legislation to punish acts of discrimination, which
would have convinced the Mexican government that their embargo was
no longer necessary. First, the existence of the Jim Crow system in
Texas was a constant brake on the nature of programs that could be
considered by Texas. Texans were also quite conservative. Their
view of government’s appropriate role in society left them with the
feeling that educating, investigating, and persuading marked the
extent of their reach. Other key lessons to be drawn from this
study include the intractable nature of illegal immigration across
the U.S.-Mexican border. This study also reveals something about
how the Truman administration approached foreign relations with
those nations on the periphery of the Cold War struggle. Truman
hoped to protect vulnerable groups of laborers, both U.S. and
Mexican. His approach to the issue revealed the part of himself
that supported the Fair Deal, rather than the part that enunciated
the Truman Doctrine.
Advisors/Committee Members: Hahn, Peter (Advisor).

► Powerful semiotic signs like the Great Wall of China and the Berlin Wall served significant communicative functions. The modern culture of nation state wall building…
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▼ Powerful semiotic signs like the Great Wall of China and the Berlin Wall served significant communicative functions. The modern culture of nation state wall building continues despite the fact that the security fences are obsolete. Wall advocates argue that security fences deter undocumented immigrants from trying to cross the border illegally. The walls also function to stop terrorism or other criminal threats. This paper applies semiotic and hermeneutic methods to examine and compare the communication functions of South African apartheid with the U.S. Mexico border wall. Structuration Theory (ST),and Dissociation and Dimensional Accrual (DAD) are applied to discuss the consequences to communication from such barriers.
Advisors/Committee Members: Kramer, Eric Mark (advisor), O'Neill, Sean (committee member), Rodriguez, Clemencia (committee member), Hsieh, Elaine (committee member), Reedy, Justin (committee member).

Thornton, T. J. (2015). COMMUNICATION FUNCTIONS OF SOUTH AFRICA APARTHEID AND THE U.S. MEXICO SECURITY FENCE. (Doctoral Dissertation). University of Oklahoma. Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/11244/14439

Chicago Manual of Style (16th Edition):

Thornton, Tyler J. “COMMUNICATION FUNCTIONS OF SOUTH AFRICA APARTHEID AND THE U.S. MEXICO SECURITY FENCE.” 2015. Doctoral Dissertation, University of Oklahoma. Accessed June 07, 2020.
http://hdl.handle.net/11244/14439.

Thornton TJ. COMMUNICATION FUNCTIONS OF SOUTH AFRICA APARTHEID AND THE U.S. MEXICO SECURITY FENCE. [Doctoral Dissertation]. University of Oklahoma; 2015. Available from: http://hdl.handle.net/11244/14439

The Creating Borderlands using a Multicultural Approach: a reflective ethnography focuses on an exploration into the psychological landscapes of junior-level students, whose minds have been…
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The Creating Borderlands using a Multicultural Approach: a reflective ethnography focuses on an exploration into the psychological landscapes of junior-level students, whose minds have been riddled with stereotypes, single-stories, and images of Nazi Germany and of the Jewish people. The research navigates these young minds through a sea of images and preconceptions of the German and Jewish cultures and attempts to break down barriers, and reconstruct a borderland and a geography of renewed/reshaped understanding.
The research intends to explore issues of social justice through a multimodal, multi-literacy unit within the context of the Holocaust. Through the qualitative paradigm of ethnography the research uncovers a mosaic of preconceptions and stereotypes, a tapestry of emotions, and a puzzle of renewed cultural awareness.
Key terms:
Border Crossing, Social Scaffolding, Multimodal Literacy, Reflexive Ethnography, Narrative Inquiry, Cultural Awareness, Polyvocality, Autobiographical Narrative, Qualitative Paradigm, Bricolage, Reflexivity, Multicultural Education

► The present project explores the narrative construction of masculinities, violence, and nationalism in three U.S.-Mexico borderland novels written by U.S., Mexican, and Mexican-American writers: Caballero…
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▼ The present project explores the narrative construction of masculinities, violence, and nationalism in three U.S.-Mexico borderland novels written by U.S., Mexican, and Mexican-American writers: Caballero (1930s-40s, pub.1996) by Jovita González and Eve Raleigh; Blood Meridian (1985) by Cormac McCarthy; and Texas: La gran ladronería en el lejano norte (2012) by Carmen Boullosa. Through the scope of masculinity, gender, and (post)colonial studies, this project examines how these authors incorporate hegemonic masculine archetypes and their attendant forms of violence (physical, economic, and epistemic) so as to interrogate claims to identity and national belonging along the Texas-Mexico border, against the backdrop of war and U.S. imperialism. In their roles as builders and/or defenders of an expanding nation-state, the male characters studied here enact distinct forms of violence in order to normalize their positions of power and further encode their claims to political and cultural hegemony. Considered together, the texts studied here demonstrate how the intersection of nationalism, masculinity construction, and particular forms of violence converge within an Anglo hegemonic masculinity to the detriment of Mexicans, non-white borderland individuals, and women – all of whom stand at the periphery of this imagined national (male) community.

► This study explores borderlands as a function of the imposition of the post-colonial state upon primary structures of identity, polity and social organisation which may…
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▼ This study explores borderlands as a function of the imposition of the post-colonial state upon primary structures of identity, polity and social organisation which may be sub-state, national or trans-state in nature. This imposition, particularly in the postcolonial experience of Asia, manifests itself in incongruence between identities of nation and state, between authority and legitimacy, and between beliefs and systems, each of which is most acutely demonstrated in the dynamic borderlands where the competition for influence between non-state and state centres of political gravity is played out. The instability in borderlands is a product of the re-territorialisation of pre-state primary structures, and the state's efforts in accommodating, assimilating or suppressing these structures through a combination of militarisation, providing opportunities for greater political enfranchisement, and the structure of trans-borderland economic flows. The Pashtun tribes of the Afghan borderland between Pakistan and Afghanistan are exhibiting a resurgence of autonomy from the state, as part of the re-territorialisation of the primary substructure of Pakhtunkhwa that underlies southern Afghanistan and north-western Pakistan. This phenomenon is localised, tribally driven, and replicated across the entirety of Pakhtunkhwa. It is a product of the pashtunwali mandated autonomy of zai from which every kor, killi and khel derives its security, and through the protection of which each is able to raise its nang, and is able to realise its position within the larger clan or tribe. Other examples of competition between postcolonial states and primary structures are the Kurdish experience in south-eastern Turkey and the experience of the Arab state. While manifesting significant peculiarities, all three cases - the Kurds, the Arabs and the Pashtuns - demonstrate that the current configuration of the postcolonial state system in Asia is a fragile construction, imposed upon enduring, pre-state primary structures which are resurgent through competition with the state.

► In this dissertation I explore the complexities of culture contact and colonialism through the lens of daily foodways to evaluate cultural interaction and entanglements between…
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▼ In this dissertation I explore the complexities of culture contact and colonialism through the lens of daily foodways to evaluate cultural interaction and entanglements between disparate cultural groups. Focusing on provincial sites of the Middle Horizon (A.D. 600 – 1000) Wari Empire in the south-central Peruvian Andes, I incorporate macrobotanical and microbotanical remains to investigate not only how food was a medium through which Wari colonists and indigenous groups negotiated the colonial encounter on the Wari frontier, but also use food to interpret the nature of the contact. Plant presence, processing and discard activities, architectural features, and artifacts associated with household structures form the basis of analysis for characterizing site foodways. This examination of plant-based food activities informed my interpretation of Wari provincial cuisine and serves as a means to evaluate how cultural negotiations were experienced by both colonizer and indigenous groups on the frontier.A qualitative comparison of spatial patterns of archaeobotanical remains from three provincial Wari sites, including Cerro Baúl in the Moquegua Valley, Quilcapampa in the Siguas Valley, and Hatun Cotuyoc in the Lucre Basin, serves as the foundation for developing provincial Wari cuisine. Similarities and differences in the patterning of plant remains and associations between plant types, site architecture, artifacts, and space, were identified at these provincial Wari sites. Although environmental factors, interregional trade, and local colonial entanglements likely limited the production and distribution of certain plants, I argue the identified foodways shared between the sites represent a collective Wari provincial cuisine. This provincial cuisine could have produced and maintained a cohesive Wari identity on the borderlands and frontiers of the empire.The Wari pattern of plant use at Cerro Baúl was compared to those of the local indigenous Huaracane at the site of Yahuay Alta in the Moquegua Valley to determine if foodways may have served as a medium of culture contact. The plant data suggest that upon Wari incursion into the Moquegua Valley the Wari and Huaracane communities shared food traditions. Specifically, at Yahuay Alta (Huaracane site) I recovered large quantities of molle drupes (Schinus molle), a plant I assert is a primary element of Wari provincial foodways. I argue that during this period of Wari colonization and culture contact, the Huaracane adopted the Wari practice of brewing chicha de molle. Interestingly, the identified pattern of molle use at Yahuay Alta differs from the Wari sites, suggesting the indigenous Huaracane adopted the Wari practice of brewing chicha de molle but did so on their own terms by integrating the practice into an existing set of social, economic, and political organizations.The approach to culture contact and colonialism employed in this dissertation departs from previous studies by considering quotidian foodways as a salient element of cultural interaction in the past. From a…

► How does gaining an empire change the conqueror? Why is the assimilation of new populations, goods, and ideas sometimes seen as a marker of a…
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▼ How does gaining an empire change the conqueror? Why is the assimilation of new populations, goods, and ideas sometimes seen as a marker of a people's greatness, and at other times as a dangerous threat from within? This project analyzes immigration to three capital cities: Athens (5th-4th centuries BCE), Rome (1st-4th centuries CE), and Chang'an, capital of Tang dynasty China (7th-10th centuries CE). It analyzes ancient textual and archaeological evidence through the lens of borderland theory to argue that the boundaries surrounding immigrant neighborhoods transformed each of these iconic cities into urban borderlands where ideas of social otherness had physical analogues. It was in these urban borderlands that the problem of how to accommodate new populations into existing structures of imperial domination was worked out. In their respective heydays, Athens, Rome, and Chang'an functioned as centers of government, economic powerhouses, global schools, sites of religious pilgrimage, and tourist attractions. Many of the diverse immigrants they attracted settled in the neighborhoods at the center of this analysis: Athens' port of Piraeus, Rome's Trans Tiberim district, and Northwest Chang'an. These communities stood out as "small worlds" within their cities at large, where ethnic, linguistic, and cultural differences overlapped with physical boundaries such as rivers, roads, and walls. Residents carved out places for themselves in their new homes by learning how to skillfully navigate these boundaries. Whether by traversing the urban landscape during their daily commute, participating in civic or religious ceremonies, or attending festivals and entertainments, newcomers came into contact with locals on a daily basis. These interactions blurred lines between "us" and "them" in ways that called into question the limits of national identity and, depending on the circumstances, could either fan the flames of xenophobia or nurture new cultural syntheses. In this sense, life at the center of the Athenian, Roman, and Tang empires resembled that on their outer frontiers, where "civilized" insiders and "barbarian" outsiders lived poised between intimate coexistence and violent rejection. Assessing these imperial capitals as urban borderlands allows us see that this tension was not an aberration or strictly a regional phenomenon. It was quite literally built into the heart of all three empires.

► This thesis examines the borderlands history of the Cree (nêhiyawak; primarily under Chief Little Bear) from 1885 to 1917. It combines archival research, digital mapping…
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▼ This thesis examines the borderlands history of the Cree (nêhiyawak; primarily under Chief Little Bear) from 1885 to 1917. It combines archival research, digital mapping (GIS), ethnohistory, and data analysis to track Indigenous movements and to analyze how the Cree navigated their status as “foreign” Indians. It focuses on Cree transnational mobility, diplomacy, and resistance from the events of 1885 at Frog Lake, North-west Territories, to the eventual creation of the Rocky Boy Reservation and its membership roll in 1917. This research determines not only how the border affected the lives of the Cree, but also how the Cree created the borderlands in which they lived. I argue that although the Cree suffered from substantial hostility, violence, and dislocation, they successfully worked within and challenged restrictive colonial notions of land and nationhood imposed by the international border. Finally, this thesis argues that the shifting and haphazard ways colonial regimes defined Indigenous identities created fissures in pre-existing community and kinship structures that continue to create challenges for these communities.
Advisors/Committee Members: Hoy, Benjamin, Smith, Marth, Englebert, Robert, Kalinowski, Angela, Wheeler, Winona.